4w ago

Carney signs order to prioritize middle-class tax cut, after first meeting with new cabinet

www.ctvnews.ca Middle-class tax cut: Carney signs order to prioritize promise

Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a symbolic order signalling his government will prioritize passing his promised middle-class tax cut, following the first in-person meeting of his cabinet on Parliament Hill Wednesday.

Canada @lemmygrad.ml

“I think we’re going to see our government run like a corporation, which I think is long overdue,” said New Brunswick’s Wayne Long, who was sworn in as secretary of state for the Canada Revenue Agency

www.ctvnews.ca /politics/article/carney-signs-order-to-prioritize-middle-class-tax-cut-after-first-meeting-with-new-cabinet/

24 13

Canada @lemmy.ml

www.ctvnews.ca /politics/article/carney-signs-order-to-prioritize-middle-class-tax-cut-after-first-meeting-with-new-cabinet/

0 1

93 comments

Instead of tax cuts to help the middle class, what they should really do is:
Reduce privatization.
So much of our country is owned privately for the sake of profit.
This is why everything is so expensive, it’s because we let rent seekers own our infrastructure.
I want my government to start making money without further relying on middle class income.
- Yea but that's the Liberal party you're talking about. If you want that, you should vote NDP.
  
  The NDP does not support land value tax.
- Yeah, private ownership concentration is a huge problem leading to monopolies, lack of innovation, and worsening treatment of both customers and employees in general. As I understand it, all funds have increasingly gone to parasitic shareholders more than ever since CEO pay has shifted more and more to pay in company stock.
  I’d love more publicly-run utility and transportation networks as you said, but in other less critical areas we could probably benefit from a more competitive system of small-to-medium-sized cooperatives that could (ideally, in a perfect world) replace corporations entirely. I would love to see support for worker groups with solid business plans to receive government grants (or at least forgiving loans) to help them buy their private sector workplaces for conversion to a democratic business model where employee-owners don’t get treated like serfs and businesses have to win over customers to survive, rather than trapping them and getting complacent.
  *edited to add that last bit in italics
- Do you think that's something they could easily do? It's a nice idea, but it's much more complicated to do anything about that
  
  What if the government just started running crown corporations again? They could price things a lot lower and take business away from the private entities. It'll take some initial investment, but that's money well spent I think.
  Maybe start with insurance and undercut that entire industry. Then use the profit to fund the establishment of other crown corps. Since they don't have to appease shareholders, all of the profit can go towards this.
  
  So? We can do hard things.
  
  deleting because I replied to the wrong comment!

Sweet now let's raise it on foreign billionaires who try to defraud our EV rebates
- Let's also do domestic billionaires (yea we have some).
- Why have an EV rebate at all. Im sure the poor are overjoyed to gift their landlord a rebate for their new EV sports car. Meanwhile we are the only country in the G7 without high speed rail, while many of our highways were built in the 1960s.
  
  Tbf high speed rail is now in the works, although moving at a pretty glacial pace.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alto_(high-speed_rail)
- I'm kind of hoping they will. The government does not have too much money right now. I see no reason not to add a few percent to the top or second-to-top tax bracket.

I'll repeat again, I don't need a fucking tax cut. I need the price of housing to start going down.
Increase taxes on property significantly, and use 100% of that money to give everyone a basic income.
This incentivizes both people and developers to be efficient with their housing choices. Using too much housing for the area you live in? You pay extra to help out everyone. Using the right amount? No harm to you. Using less than the average? Here's a payout, thank you.
Prices overall will drop, because it's no longer profitable to simply own a home due to the taxes, and especially not if there's no people in it because the taxes won't be offset by the basic income.
- All they need to do is make it so you can only own one residence, if you own a second as income property it should be taxed to the point that you want to sell it.
  I was in the rental stream before and at least 1 landlord was foreign owners from mainland China--the property had sat empty for six months before us because owner was rich and didn't care about the 2k month they were losing. Another was an unlocatable landlord, the strara paperwork showed China owner, but correspondence was coming from Korean contact info. It started to look more like shell company ownership. Also have two friends who's Vancouver places are Asian owned. Owners moved back to China and main house was vacant for 2+ years, just single basement tennant paying utilities to make place "occupied".
  
  This is a red herring.
  I ran the calculations a while back, that may free up 2-4% of all housing, that is not enough to fix the problem of expensive housing. That's only 1-2 years of new building stock.
  It won't hurt to do it, but it's simply not the main reason real estate is expensive.
  
  It would also be fun to have squatting laws like some other countries do. Vacant properties can be taken over (e.g. someone does a B&E then just starts living there) and if the "owner" doesn't notice soon enough they start losing their rights to the property. If you get mail at an address, if your stuff is there, if you are the one doing maintenance, all that counts in your favor as a resident. Even if your initial entry was aided by an angle grinder. In some cases actual ownership can end up transferred to the functional residence without any cost. The absentee owner loses their rights.
- I have a much more clear cut policy:
  You can live in one home
  You can't own a home you don't live in
  Occasionally someone has a big place and someone has a small place, but this would solve way more issues.
  
  It really wouldn't.
  A) It prevents renting at all except for basement suites. So no more rental buildings, which make up the majority of rentals available. Renting is an important housing option, as not everyone wants to own, nor should they have to. Move to a city to go to university, and you have to buy a house just to live in for 2-4 years before you have to sell it to move elsewhere for a job? Have a job that requires you go somewhere else for a few months while you
  <build a bridge>
  
  <implement a new computer system>
  
  <train some people>
  , too bad hotel for 6 months instead of being able to rent an apartment.
  B) If you do the math and even take out dedicated rental buildings, there really aren't that many homes that are owned as a second place. It's about 15% of the total market, and a large chunk of that are cottages and lake houses away from the cities where people actually want to live.
  The big place/small place issue is actually more of a problem than the the double ownership you're talking about. There are more total bedrooms in Canada than there are people, and once you account for couples usually sharing a bedroom, there's actually a ton of extra bedrooms across the country. The problem is that they're not distributed properly across the population, 4+ bedroom family homes that were bought to raise children are being kept for decades by empty-nest couples who don't want to downsize.
- Yes but what about the profits of investors? Have you thought of them? You meany.
- There's an idea I hadn't thought of before. I wonder if there's any studies out there about how much space a single person needs to be comfortable. And how that'd change base on how many others are in the same space. Could be interesting idea to tax people based on their space to people ratio 🤔
  
  There are studies on that, but they're not super relevant because the appropriate amount of space is determined by how many people want to live somewhere, not based on the specific size.
  People are willing to live in smaller places the closer they are to amenities. It's a gradient, not a single value even for each location.
  
  I wonder if there’s any studies out there about how much space a single person needs to be comfortable.
  Culturally dependent, I'm pretty sure. Housing in Japan can be pretty tiny. Canada's on the large side.
  It also depends on the person and their habits: introverts and people who spend more time at home are likely to want more personal space.
  
  If I'm understanding this correctly, you wouldn't need to adjust any taxes based on occupancy. The property tax would be fixed based on the value, as it is now but higher. If a single person lived in a big house the new guaranteed income might be less than the tax increase, if you added a second person you'd double the income and potentially cancel out the increase. If you had a family of four in that same house, you'd potentially pay no taxes at all or even get some back.
- He's also planning to start a big government-driven building program at some point.
  I don't expect this guy is going to do a basic income. That's a radical policy that's not really on-brand for him, and we have some crises going on that need the political oxygen.
- Carneys housing minister said he doesn't want prices to fall.
  Congrats, you voted Liberal. The party of debt and future austerity, and importing people to hide falling GDP and to prop up home values.
  
  I didn't vote liberal.
  I voted NDP, but even they didn't have a plan to actually drop housing prices.
  
  What was the conservative plan again?
  
  No party wants prices to fall because the economy is so built around ever-increasing prices that if prices do fall then the economy falls with it.

I think that increasing the basic personal exemption would have helped a lot more lower income Canadians
- Yes, but functionally no one voted NDP this year, and that was their pitch, IIRC.
  
  Wasn't it also the CPC plan?
- It may yet be part of things: a promised cut to middle class taxes should infer inclusion of the poorer.
  
  One would hope so, but I won't hold my breath.
  
  why do they say it's for "middle class" if it's for poor people?
- Make it an official tax bracket too, instead just a refund everyone qualifies for. I don't know why TF it's set up that way.

So what are they defining as "middle class" for this round? gotta love the journalism of CTV that seemed OK leaving this as "will lower tax for some Canadians"... some precise reporting there

It is time for a radical change in how we progress as a society. Money sure ain't working. "Let's keep turning these money knobs and see what happens" should not be the ultimate answer for forward progress towards something resembling a utopia, which should be the goal. I have no answers but it seems that fiddling around with economy and hoping for the best is nothing more than just killing time.
- Absolutely. Money is a signifier that only has meaning when integrated in material exchanges. Radical, bold restructurations are needed in order to ameliorate our country's socioeconomic reality.

How about giving us income splitting so that I don't pay more in taxes than a two income family that makes more than I do?

I don't know if I count as middle class. But I remember the first year I didn't get all my taxes back on rebate. I was SO HAPPY to be making enough money to pay taxes.
Still feeling that way even though I am getting broker over time as the rent goes up and my wage doesn't.
It would be more worthwhile to do price controls on those loblaws assholes.
- Middle class is a made up term meant to separate the working class. It doesn't mean anything. The definition of middle class is vibes alone because it's a term that means nothing used by pandering politicians.
  I agree that systemic solutions should be the focus but unfortunately the Liberals are incapable of challenging the system.
  
  lol that's why I don't know if I count as middle class. because class is about yer relationship to capital. "middle class" is meaningless.
  libs won't do squat. I'm just shit talking and planting seeds
  🌱🌱🌹🌱🍉🌱🌱

This is to placate people who think voting gives you instant gratification. This isn't for people who pay attention.
- It's all a big show regardless of who is in office and people eat it up. Drama for the masses.

Step one: tax the rich.
Tax. The. Rich.
Tax them until we eliminate working poverty. Tax them until we can move away from destroying the environment. Tax them until we eliminate billionaires entirely.

Disappointing to see adoption of CPC/PP platform cluelessness policy priority. Canada needs to spend on industrial policy to fight US, and prepare for hardships. His first BS of offering US empire more weapons purchases for more force multiplier warmongering was embarassing enough. Head in the sand "negotiations" is not going to go well.
Priority needs to be to destroy US economy, to save Canada's. If plan is to do nothing, we can do without an auto industry too, but waiting until the crisis evolves is just negligent.
- The Liberals don't care about debt, that is for some future party to worry about, during a debt crisis.
  The NDP want a lot of social programs with high taxes, the Cons want low taxes and fewer programs, the Liberals offer a lot of social spending and low taxes by shamelessly abusing government debt.
  The debt can be abused because its backed by our ability to liquidate our public pension to pay creditors, as outlined in the last budget Freeland released.

93 comments